THE INADVERTENT GIFT FROM MILLENNIALS TO CORPORATE AMERICA

The gift I’m seeing is: a focus on the lack of real leadership in America. Millennials have been getting a bad rap for some time now. This deception and disinformation about millennials is mainly driven by the “Managers in Disguise” or executive members of the C team if you will, who are at the top of some organizational charts. These are the people in organizations who have obtained enough influence in the workplace to create the perception that millennials are bad for business. These Managers in Disguise are fighting tooth and nail to deflect all issues onto millennials in a pathetic attempt to hide their own leadership ignorance and incompetence.

I’m going to step out on a limb and say, millennials aren’t the problem, poor management is the problem. Millennials haven’t been around for centuries, poor management has. Millennials are a new challenge to a very old cultural management problem and it’s my belief that the millennials way of conducting themselves is going to expose the lack of real leadership problem in such a way that it will have to be investigated by real leaders. Of course, this investigation will in many cases be driven entirely by profits and not by principles but that’s ok for now, as long as it’s addressed. True leaders in each market will recognize and address the Managers in Disguise issue and in doing so will benefit from a larger market share due to their competitors’ unwillingness to change.

The general consensus is that millennials (Generation Y) are a difficult generation to manage which means, turning a profit with a bus full of millennials will be equally as difficult. It’s my position that every generation wants the same thing, they all want to work for an organization that’s headed in the right direction and they all want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than they already are. I believe Millennials are making a difference in ways not yet seen before; their unwillingness to tolerate Managers in Disguise and the status-quo is restricting corporate profits across America and inadvertently putting the focus on leadership or the lack thereof. I don’t think it could be any timelier if you ask me.

Millennials understand where the leadership gets its power from and that understanding has the Managers in Disguise flustered. Generation Y has turned the tables on poor management, and through their actions, they have taken away any power over them poor management ever thought they had. If you think about it, organizations with poor management are the same organizations that do not perform exit interviews or have a perception or performance feedback survey program of any sort. Wouldn’t do the Manager in Disguise any justice to have a pile of negative exit interviews and perception feedback surveys lying around that could get caught up in an audit now, would it? Better to not offer them at all is poor management’s mindset.

Millennials are the first generation who is accustomed to getting what they want while Managers in Disguise have been here since the beginning of time and are not accustomed to giving people what they want. The dysfunctional dynamic here is clear. We need to stop buying into the narrative that millennials are bad for society because they’re not. They’re about to change society and possibly the workplace forever. Millennials were raised having their expectations met by helicopter parents and are accustomed to getting everything their parents never had. This is why they have no patience or tolerance for Managers in Disguise as leaders. Millennials would rather quit without notice than deal with a non-value-added confrontation. The high turnover rate associated with generation Y is driven by poor managers and their unwillingness to change with the times, not the young employee whose expectations aren’t being met.

My leadership book MANAGERS IN DISGUISE-LEADERS IN DISGUST addresses these not-so-obvious roadblocks to success and how to avoid them. Employee retention is a key part of all successful organizations and I’ll show you how to accomplish it. I encourage you to visit https://www.leadersindisgust.com/ to continue investing in yourself by reading a few posts or purchasing a book and getting on the road to helping others as I’m attempting to do. The sooner we begin taking advantage of the wonderful gift that millennials are giving us, the sooner more Americans will be happier about going to work.